"I have read too many beige short stories in my life, " says Mark Haddon, author of the global best-seller and prize-winning novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time as he launches his new collection of short stories, The Pier Falls.
In an interview in today's Guardian, the 53-year old author talks of having read "too many short stories that feel like five-finger exercises." He talks of the limits to what can happen in the real world. "In fiction there are no limits: anything is possible on paper.
"It seems to me that if you are writing a short story and it is not more entertaining than the stories in that morning’s newspaper or that evening’s TV news, then you need to throw it away and start again, or open a cycle repair shop."
Haddon’s new collection, The Pier Falls, is published by Jonathan Cape on May 5 and is bound to dominate the summer book charts.
In the title story, a seaside pier collapses in a small town, ripping lives apart but also bonding local people with anew-found sense of togetherness. In The Woodpecker and the Wolf, a woman ruefully realises that she may have chosen to travel to Mars only to escape the entanglement of human relationships back here on Earth.
In The Island, a Greek princess is abandoned on an island by her abductor. In The Gun, a boy’s life is marked by the afternoon he encounters a semi-automatic pistol belonging to his friend’s older brother.
In 2003, Haddon - who was born in Northampton in the UK in 1962- won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. In 2004, he was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Overall Best First Book for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, which was his first novel. The compelling tale is is written from the perspective of a boy with Aspergers syndrome. Haddon's knowledge of Aspergers syndrome derived from his work with autistic people as a young man.
Aside from being a best-selling novelist, Haddon is an illustrator, screenwriter, poet, winner of two BAFTAs and the author of 15 books for children. He has enjoyed particular sucess with his series of Agent Z books, one of which, Agent Z and the Penguin from Mars, was adapted as a 1996 BBC sitcom. He also wrote the screenplay for the BBC television adaptation of Raymond Briggs's story Fungus the Bogeyman, which was aired on BBC1 in 2004. He also wrote the 2007 BBC television drama Coming Down the Mountain.
